The New Democrats at The New Republic Enter the New Economy
They don't like it any better than U.S. steelworkers did
https://t.co/7xrP7z4jgQ
— Billmon (@billmon1) December 5, 2014
Shorter Sully on TNR and race: “Say what you will, we had the courage to debate if black people were stupid.” pic.twitter.com/ng9iWFXUzo
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) December 5, 2014
Full disclosure: I currently have a subscription to The New Republic, because I was offered a loss-leader price, and I wanted unmetered / print access to writers like Alec MacGillis, John Judis, and Julia Ioffe. I’ve had TNR subs, on and off, going back to the mid-80s — their Bush I parodies were a comfort during the first Gulf War — which I cancelled whenever the latest editorial team did something particularly, egregiously terrible: the Bell Curve dishonesty, or Michael Kelly going off the rails, or giving Tony Snow a platform. The magazine’s always been a vanity project, but it’s also published a lot of great writing. So I’ve treated it like a grocery chain — when they have enough brands I like, TNR gets my business; when the latest crew of MBAs dump “my” products and reconfigure all the aisles, I switch to a different chain.
Now MacGillis and Judis and Ioffe have jumped ship, at least temporarily:
… The narrative you’re going to see Chris and Guy put out there is that I and the rest of my colleagues who quit today were dinosaurs, who think that the Internet is scary and that Buzzfeed is a slur. Don’t believe them. The staff at TNR has always been faithful to the magazine’s founding mission to experiment, and nowhere have I been so encouraged to do so. There was no opposition in the editorial ranks to expanding TNR’s web presence, to innovating digitally. Many were even board for going monthly. We’re not afraid of change. We have always embraced it.
As for the health of long-form journalism, well, the pieces that often did the best online were the deeply reported, carefully edited and fact-checked, and beautifully written. Those were the pieces that got the most clicks…
Dave Weigel has a smart take on “How #Disruption Broke The New Republic”:
… Hughes was destined to accrue more media coverage than the average owner or editor. He was a young, married, gay tycoon, and there hadn’t been many of those. He’d been credited with some of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign web success—a victory that claimed a thousand fathers—so he was an easy target for anyone who wanted to bemoan the magazine’s swing away from publishing pieces liberals hated. (Some held up well. Some, like the Iraq War advocacy and Bell Curve excerpt, less well. And then there was the endorsement of Joe Lieberman for president …)…
Foer and Hughes’s new magazine mixed TNR‘s typical intellectual interests with a certain glossy grandiosity, a sometimes clashing mixture. What exactly the new New Republic was supposed to be, and who it was for in this new era, was often hard to figure. And there were other bumps. Not long after the launch, TNR parted with columnist Tim Noah and ended the cryptically titled TRB column. That offended devotees of the magazine and friends of Noah. (He’s a former colleague and mentor, not that any of this piece is his fault.) Noah dished to Politico‘s Dylan Byers that, after Hughes’s objection to a punchy headline, he “quietly worried whether the magazine’s new owner (who around that time also told an audience at the Kennedy School that he’d like to co-brand a chain of cafes called the New Republic) might be a young man with more money than sense.”
It sounded bad, but the self-exiled staffers—and there are dozens of them—now remember a time of good cheer and great stories. And such there were. The Hughes/Foer era saw the paper break into China coverage via Beijing-based reporter Christopher Beam, whose first cover story was optioned for a movie. Russian-fluent reporter Julia Ioffe published newsy profiles on the right, then reported and corralled some of the web’s sharpest coverage of Vladimir Putin’s medal-winning, country-invading 2014. Noam Scheiber’s 2013 cover story on Elizabeth Warren helped shape the next year’s coverage of the invisible Democratic primary. Alec MacGillis wrote deeply-reported political profiles that accidentally broke open new stories. Jason Zengerle, one of the young reporters who left the magazine in the cutback era, was hired back to write big swing stories like a look at how black voters had been rendered irrelevant in the new South…
Washington was always skeptical that Chris Hughes could “save” the New Republic. In the end, Washington was right, for the wrong reasons. At some point Hughes just stopped believing that the traditional policy magazine was worth saving.
Watching the path of Omidyar's First Look and Chris Hughes’ TNR makes you appreciate what an excellent job Jeff Bezos is doing with the Post
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) December 5, 2014
And a final, gleeful kicking from some guy on the internet…
The New Republic was never anything but a warmongering racist antileft trashpile and I hope the whole enterprise burns to the ground and if you are nostalgic about it you’re nostalgic for The Bell Curve, the war on Iraq, and Marty Peretz’s Muslim Hating Neo-Fascist Jamboree. The whole enterprise was corrupt right down to its colonialist bones and if some Facebook billionaire wants to turn it into Tinder For Politico Jagbags it could not possibly suffer in comparison. Shedding tears for Leon Wiseltier’s job is like worrying about what became of Stalin’s cat. I only pray for the day that your twisted obsession with Village bric-a-brac is performed by the unpaid interns that are the inevitable future of Big Media, which will be celebrated by you neoliberal clowns right up until some 17 year old earning nothing but 3 $9,000-a-credit-hour credits literally unplugs the keyboard from your workstation. Tell Stephen Glass I said hey and shut out the lights on your way out.
Baud
Every once in a while, like now, I get a glimpse into a facet of liberalism I never really engaged in. I find this discussion fascinating.
Omnes Omnibus
I take it that Freddie has read every issue since 1914, right? Has he ever heard of Henry Wallace? W.E.B. De Bois wrote for a racist magazine? Who knew? Of course, Keynes is neceassarily antileftist.
Sure, the magazine may have gone to hell in a hand basket since the early ’70s, but it had a great reputation as a liberal and progressive bastion for a reason.
Elizabelle
Love the blogpost title, Anne.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
There you go interrupting “never” literally again.
Samuel Knight
Bezos is doing a great job with the Post? The establishment suck-up is so loud you can hear the whoosh in every political story.
Really fun how Jewish white writers like Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein just don’t want to see how incredibly offensive TNR really was.
But for me thr real problem with TNR is that they didn’t do journalism like Mother Jones. They did patently unreliable navel-gazing.
I’ll join the chorus – they sucked, good riddance
Alex
We must, just must, find a way to hate on Freddie even when we agree with him! C’mon gang, we can do this!
Mnemosyne
@Alex:
Freddie who?
Mike in NC
Nobody misses Michael Kelly.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alex: Since I disagree with him, that isn’t really a problem for me.
@Mike in NC: Not even Stephen Glass?
Anne Laurie
@Elizabelle: Stolen from Billmon’s Storify :)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, but Freddie’s not wrong about its “colonialist” roots, either — much as I love Teddy Roosevelt, he was entirely too enthusiastic about about America’s Manifest Destiny and “our” responsibility to “uplift our little brown brothers” in the Philippines and Cuba and the Congo. And The New Republic was started as a vanity project, funded by a wealthy wife, by a Roosevelt crony with big ambitions. Its ‘guiding philosophy’ has always seesawed along the Sensible Centrism line — bravely ‘revolutionary’ in prosperous eras, but craven and prone to excusing the worst reactionary excesses of ‘reasonable people’ when conventional wisdom swung the other way. Phil Ochs name-checked TNR in “Love Me, I’m A Liberal” for a reason…
Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I’ve grown older and wiser
And that’s why I’m turning you in…
Tommy
You said:
Almost everything I am buying my niece for X-mas helps her learn to program a computer. Some of the items are not computer related, but will help her understand the world around her. My parents and her grandparents will get her all the princess stuff she needs. I am going to buy her Legos, Little Bits, or a book.
Mnemosyne
@Tommy:
Have you seen the “Frozen”-themed How to Code website? It’s free to play with and is genuinely educational, not just a promotion for the Giant Evil.
ETA: You may have to deal with your niece humming “Let It Go” under her breath as she codes, but that seems like a small price to pay.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie:
Are you referring to Herbert Croly or Willard Straight?
J
Go back far enough and Edmund Wilson was (unsure of title) literary editor of the New Republic. That’s pretty impressive. Other people have mentioned Richard Strout and Stanley Kaufmann, terrific people all. I agree with TNC about the horrible things TNR has done, but I am older than he is and TNR’s strident support for Reagan’s central American policies (i.e., not to make to fine a point of it, support for murder) was the last straw for me. The endorsement of Lieberman, one of the most manifestly unqualified and unprincipled politicians of our era–I would say ‘beneath contempt’ were it not that he rises splendidly to the level of contempt–is pretty funny though. Eventually I think the history of the magazine in the last 30 years will provide insights into what’s gone wrong with America’s ruling class and ‘meritocratic’ system–for a long time its been part of the cursus honorum, Harvard (occasionally Yale–Peter Beinart), Society of Fellows blah, blah, blah,TNR a kind of latter day best and brightest who’ve been none too bright and have embraced some of the worst causes of our time.
beltane
What Atrios says: http://www.eschatonblog.com/2014/12/a-wank-of-writers.html
TNR may have had some good writers but this is certainly outweighed by the enormous damage it inflicted on the American Left during the course of the last two generations.
Howard Beale IV
@Mnemosyne: Just what we need-another reinvention of the 30-year old Logo language.
beltane
@Alex: I am willing to concede that Freddie DeBoer might be maturing. There was nothing at all for me to hate on in his TNR critique.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: I lay it squarely at the feet of Marty Peretz. He went neo-con on foreign policy and neo-liberal on the domestic front. And then he hired shitty editors – with the exception of Hertzberg and arguably Foer.
Mnemosyne
@Howard Beale IV:
I freely admit, I know zero about coding, but kids gotta start somewhere, right? I’m not sure where else you would start kids under about age 10 on the process of coding.
GregB
In fairness to the Sullivan era at TNR, it did prompt liberals to discuss the theory postulating if all British Tory emigres to the US are inveterate assholes and quasi-fascists.
Mnemosyne
I should be building my new bookcases from Ikea, but I’m not. Instead, I will probably finish drying my hair and then wander up the street to buy a new 16″ circular needle to make my niece and nephew’s Christmas hats.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well of course it did, but you can’t expect Freddie to put anything in historical context, now can you? I mean if he says it’s always been warmongering, that makes it so.
Marty Peretz broke it irretrievably. Which does not negate its rich history, but it sure as hell makes it as good as worthless now. I suspect you and I rather agree on this topic.
Baud
@Mnemosyne:
Only an act of true love can print “Hello World” on your computer terminal.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I like Chait, but watching him rather petulantly minimize the magazine’s history of racism, and it’s a lot more than just The Bell Curve, is kind of painful, especially after his highly probelmatic article on race and politics last year. He worked for Peretz, fercrissake. And Sullivan…. oy
Also, while I recognize that a lot of this seems to be fueled by personal and professional regard for Franklin Foer, I’m also getting a pretty strong whiff of people wallowing in their own elite status. One of them said that something about most people criticizing TNR were rejected for internships, I think a shot at Ezra Klein, if I recall some old internet gossip, and one of the smarmy neo-liberal sub-Kinsleys from Slate tweeted something about anyone who hasn’t resigned from TNR is unworthy to work at TNR. A hearty fuck you to him.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: TNR ended up being something of a Trojan horse, a trusted liberal institution commandeered by racists and economic enemies of the left, but still read by and influential with actual liberals. An analogous situation would be if The National Review was taken over by the editors of Jacobin though featuring the occasional article by Ross Douthat or Charles Krauthammer.
Omnes Omnibus
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
I suspect we do.
@beltane:
That would be awesome. I wonder how one arranges such a thing. I guess the first step is to marry an heiress….
srv
Freddie hit that bell out of the ballpark.
The gliberals here should be ashamed of themselves.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Step 2: Kill the in-laws.
beltane
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: What do you call people who are hyper-sensitive when it comes to racism directed at their own group, but either oblivious or dismissive when it comes to racism directed at anyone else?
Corner Stone
@beltane:
In the last 30 years? The read by part, possibly. What position or viewpoint have they advocated for in modern times that actual people of the “left” suasion bought into?
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus: Apologies, I was conflating the two founders — Croly was the editor, Straight had the rich wife.
schrodinger's cat
Come to think of it I have actually never seen a paper copy of TNR. What is its circulation?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@beltane: Senior Editor?
schrodinger's cat
@beltane: Hypocrites?
Baud
@beltane:
People.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Ha.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Another guy funded by his wife (Singer sewing-machine heiress, IIRC). But Peretz was only one in a proud tradition.
beltane
@Corner Stone: For the past 10 years TNR has been without much influence to speak of. During the Clinton and early Bush years the magazine was still able to persuade liberals-not leftists per se-to support neoliberalism at home and neoconservatism abroad against their better instincts.
schrodinger's cat
My comment was eated, trying again.
There is hardly any point in learning to code, because some graduate of Osmania University could take away your job. Marrying an heiress or an heir is a better option.
ETA: Unless you are really into it, coding is just a necessary evil and super boring.
Corner Stone
@beltane:
I don’t remember it that way, sorry.
ETA, Ah I see I carelessly transposed liberal and left from your comment. I see now you’re making a distinction of some sort.
I will re-iterate that my thoughts on TNR are they had no influence with people left of center for some decades now.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Step 3: Kill the spouse, inherit everything or else go to jail.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodinger’s cat: from wiki
Year Avg Paid Circ % Change
2000[26] 101,651
2001[26] 88,409 −13.0
2002[27] 85,069 −3.8
2003[28] 63,139 −25.8
2004[29] 61,675 −2.3
2005[30] 61,771 +0.2
2006[31] 61,024 −1.2
2007[32] 59,779 −2.0
2008[33] 65,162 +9.0
2009[33] 53,485 −18.0
2010[34] NR NR
Looks like they got a bit of a bump when Peretz was sidelined, and lost it when they dropped the paywall. That 25% drop off in ’03 I assume was about Iraq, and that included my father, who had been a subscriber since I think the early sixties.
@Anne Laurie: Buckley, too. His family was fairly wealthy, but had nothing on the Bozells, IIRC.
beltane
Heiresses seem to have terrible taste in men. Tom Friedman is also married to an heiress. Is there no such thing as a trophy husband?
Mnemosyne
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think coding is becoming more casual and DIY these days, though. I myself am an Old, but my 14-year-old niece was coding her own computer game based on her favorite fantasy book series because there is no official game based on it. So I think the teach kids to code thing is more so they can play with it to make their own programs and know how coding works, not so they’ll go into it as a career.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane:
I have a shot then.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: No I meant hard core coding in a programming language like C or C++, not just tweaking a program to customize it or writing your own macro in Excel.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, stop! The reason you are not married to an heiress is that you are a nice person. Maybe if you start a blog devoted to hippie-punching and war-mongering you will attract marriage proposals from women of means.
schrodinger's cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Isn’t David Brooks’ ex wife on the market right now?
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They’re insufferable, but that’s not the worst part. It’s the cluelessness:
Everyone believes that about their profession, and everyone says that when their profession (which they value! it’s unique! they do important work!) is jammed into the currently fashionable business template.
Replace “journalist” with “public school teacher” and try to imagine any of them writing that paragraph.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: What is her net worth? We cannot marry off OO to a woman without the means to fund the operating costs of a political magazine.
Mnemosyne
@schrodinger’s cat:
That’s what I’m saying though — from what Kids These Days are telling me, there’s a pretty wide range of DIY stuff you can do between writing a macro in Excel and coding in C++. If I remember the name of the website my niece was using, I’ll let you know.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: If most op-ed writers in major newspapers were replaced by their counterparts on high school or college newspapers that would be a huge improvement. There are a few exceptions, like Paul Krugman at NYT but they are few and far between.
Southern Goth
@Mnemosyne:
…the code never bothered me anyway.
Anne Laurie
@beltane:
Guys like Marty Peretz and Tom Friedman are trophy husbands. They wouldn’t be your trophy, or mine, but marrying a Serious Thinker with Important Ideas is still a prize for an ambitious heiress looking to differentiate herself from all her fellow private-school graduates at the country club. Ms. Shopping Mall Magnate’s Daughter won’t get invited to Sally Quinn’s parties, or mentioned in Vanity Fair‘s gossip pages, but Mrs. Tom Friedman could be.
Thorstein Veblen would recognize these couples… and laugh while dissecting them. (Heck, imagine what Veblen would’ve done with the new “leisure class” marriages like for-instance Chris Hughes’ — the guy who bought TNR just tried, and failed, to buy his husband a seat in the NY Senate, because he wanted to influence from inside, not just give money to elect people like President Obama.)
Corner Stone
@efgoldman: It hasn’t been all that exciting, unless you’re commenter Bnut.
Missouri might try running the ball a little bit more effectively.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: According Buzzfeed the Brookses are still married, so we need a new candidate anyway.
schrodinger's cat
@Anne Laurie: Should they also lean in while learning to code?
Baud
@Kay:
You linked to a Megan McArdle article without a trigger warning.
I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen you do, Kay.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
Maybe the Brookses are looking for a third?
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Himalayan Salt Vitamix Princess? Since DougJ left to get married we haven’t heard much about McCardle.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodinger’s cat: That nice Jennifer Anniston lady is quite rich.
@Baud: ::shudder::
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Baud: I’m pretty sure it’s the worst thing I’ve known Kay to do.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Why do you hate OO?
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
I think so. To be honest, I have difficulty keeping my Village pundits straight.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Baud: What Omnes expressed, with an added “ick.”
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
C’mon, man. I’m trying to find you some mag money. You have to learn to disrupt the paradigm.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: There are few depths to which I will not sink in this quest, but that is one of them.
Kay
@Baud:
I was laughing because I thought The Queen Of Disruptive Innovation would see the trap. Nope. It’s like at a hearing when someone walks right into it and you’re jumping out of your seat. “Oooh, oooh, pick me! I have something to say to that!”
My job, like hers, can’t be measured with their crude “value added data metrics”
Me and everyone else in the world :)
Baud
@Kay:
I wouldn’t have thought that. The principle of Keep the Government Out of My Medicare isn’t confined to government or Medicare.
tsquared2001
I used to steal The New Republic issues out of the library. That and the NYT Magazine were my jam
Omnes Omnibus
@tsquared2001: You scamp.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s a guy who’ll do what it takes to get mag money.
Corner Stone
@tsquared2001:
Too poor to afford toilet paper?
Kathleen
@Baud: In fairness, they all write alike.
Baud
@Kay:
As far as the hypocrisy goes, I think the privatizers operate on the assumption that private companies taking over public institutions in inherently a good, and is therefore subject to a different set of economic and management principles than a private takeover of another private institution, like when billionaires purchase publications. It’s an article of faith which I doubt they can be reasoned out of.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: In other words, it’s different because it’s different.
lamh36
Late to the thread, but I’m back from the car dealership, and…woo sah, woo sah.
So ya’ll know I was only interested in test driving the cars, checking possible trade value, and maybe, just maybe checking to see what pricing they would try to give. But, I NEVER PLANNED TO BUY A CAR TODAY. Of course I didn’t tell them all of that went I first got there.
So I arrived at the 1st dealership, Hyundai. First of all my internet contact wasn’t there, but she told someone else that I was coming though, so not that big a deal, but still not who I was interacting with. Ok, so then introduce me to the sales dude who was gonna be talking to me about the car and also conduct the test drive and sales pitch.
That part of the visit went fine. He didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know, I paid more attention to the price tag as he was talking, but we made small talk (which honestly, I hate doing in ANY situation). He talked to me about the Sonata and the Tuscon (I had already decided against the Santa Fe). I own the 2005 Tuscon so i figured I’d check out the new model. After that I decided the new Tuscon wasn’t for me, so I decided on the Sonata. So then the test drive commenced. It went fine, more about that later.
So once we finish with the test drive, next up is the pricing and sales pitch of course. I was more interested in the trade in value than pricing since I HAD NO PLANS TO BUY A CAR TODAY! So he brought me the first offer and I really only looked at the pricing and the trade in value. The pricing was in the range I wanted, but it was the higher range of what i had seen quoted. So I told him I didn’t want to go above 25,000 including taxes, title, license, etc. The APR was the basically the same as my pre-approved amount. The trade-in amount was the lower end of the range I expected, but still within the range I expected.
Still, I HAD NO PLANS TO BUY A CAR TODAY, and I told him as much. I guess he still saw opportunity in my face or he thought I was negotiating, because he kept going to his sales manager and coming back. He did this 5X! Each time I told him that I liked the car, I liked the warranty, but I HAD NO PLANS TO BUY A CAR TODAY. After the final time, I told him, I HAVE NO PLANS TO BUY A CAR TODAY AND I PLAN TO STICK TO IT. I told him, unless he coming back and giving me the car for $100, I DO NOT HAVE PLANS TO BUY A CAR TODAY!
I guess he finally got it, because after the last time he said “ok” and went to his sales manager to tell him I DO NOT HAVE PLANS TO BUY A CAR TODAY! Finally he brought me my keys and gave me a copy of the last offer he made to me (which BTW included an $500 increase in the trade in value of my old car! Which pissed me off since of course I’m thinking, so why didn’t you offer me that amount the first time…bastards!)
I left and went on my way…It started out fine, but after the test drive and the fifth time, I told him I DO NOT HAVE PLANS TO BUY A CAR TODAY, I was just aggravated.
So I probably won’t be getting a vehicle from that dealership. The next dealership was better, but that’s for another post.
Ugh…I hated every minute after the damn test drive…ugh!
Fuckin’ hate car shopping!
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep.
@lamh36:
Quite normal and expected. Once you’re in the door, they don’t want you to leave without having purchased a car.
Omnes Omnibus
@lamh36: I once chose between two cars because one dealer did not respect my statement that I was not buying that day and the other one did.
sm*t cl*de
What did happen to Stalin’s cat, anyway?
Omnes Omnibus
@sm*t cl*de: It died.
lamh36
@Omnes Omnibus: Well, I actually plan to buy a Sonata after the test driving. I didn’t really like the seats in Mazdas. I’m a big girl, even thought I”m trying to lose so weight, and it took me years to get this way, and so I expect it to take years to get rid of it.
So the kinda angled seating on the Mazdas were not comfortable, and the console arrangment and such wasn’t very comfortable to me. I’m 5’8″ with some pretty broad shoulders for a lady (I”m no linebacker by any means, just my family are a tall, broad shouldered family, I can even see it in lil Maddie).
The Sonata was just the right amount of space I wanted and the turbo engine gives it pretty good pickup. It’s also a much quieter ride than the Mazda, and maybe it’s cause of how uncomfortable I found the seats, but I felt like I could feel every bump and grind.
Also too, the Hyundai warranty, really is the best in the business, the only comparable one is the Kia warranty, which is actually same company, just Hyundai is the richer/higher quality sibling. When I was talking up my Tuscon, I realized that that warranty was the best thing about the Tuscon. I’ve had it for almost 9 years (soon to be 10 in January) and the only reason I’m getting rid of it is cause it’s at 102,000 miles, and little issues have been popping up and they have begun to add up. And since I tend to keep cars for a long time, I figured the longer warranty would be best.
Still, the whole back and forth, I’M NOT BUYING A CAR TODAY, thing really pissed me off. And I kept telling him that I liked the car. I even told him that the car was at the top of my list (more than top actually, I had pretty much decided on the Sonata based on warranty alone, I just HAD to check out those Mazdas cause I love the look of them).
So now that I know the car I want, I’m gonna shop around and stick to internet sales. I will NOT be going back to a dealership except to pick up the new car!
Omnes Omnibus
@lamh36: Everything I have heard about the Sonata is that is a good solid car.
Redshift
@schrodinger’s cat:
In my experience, coding is super boring to people who think it’s super boring (just like infinitely many other things), not to everyone who’s not “really into it.” Unless you’re forced to work on something really crappy (and I count myself lucky to have avoided more than a minimal amount of C++), it can be creative, fun, and stimulating. But don’t worry, guys like me plus all the kids who are having a great time learning to code these days promise to stay off your lawn.
Another one of these big disruptions that’s been predicted for at least twenty years, but never seems to actually happen in the real world. Yes, the Internet makes it technically feasible to farm out projects to India or Eastern Europe, but it turns out that the challenges of management and communicating what you want are not insignificant. If there was going to be a big crash in tech jobs, there’s no reason it wouldn’t have happened by now.
Mnemosyne
@lamh36:
That was one of the reasons I did not buy a Toyota (other than liking the Subaru better) — the salesman took my driver’s license for the test drive and would not give it back until I finally convinced his boss that I was not going to buy a car that day. Frankly, I ended playing the my dad just died card (which was true) to get them to leave me the eff alone.
Redshift
@lamh36: Henry Ford hired horse traders to be salesmen for his cars. The entire culture of car sales since then derives from that. Explains a lot.
Mnemosyne
@lamh36:
If you belong to Costco, they have a service where you can get the car at the invoice price. Also, if you belong to a credit union, a lot of them have car-buying services, and will even take care of the trade-in for you. I think AAA has one as well.
I ended up buying direct from the dealership through a program the Giant Evil has with them — because the GE buys fleet vehicles from that dealership group, we got 2% below invoice with no haggling. They didn’t screw around with me because they didn’t want me going back to my employer and complaining that they were jerks.
Mnemosyne
@Redshift:
There’s a reason all of those tech companies keep bringing coders over on H1B visas instead of sending the jobs to India or Russia. It’s really kind of a pain in the ass to communicate with an office that’s 12 hours away so you’re either having early-morning or late-night meetings all the time.
Redshift
@Mnemosyne: Yes, unless you are someone who enjoys haggling, car buying services are the way to go. I’ve used Costco and USAA, and had excellent experiences with both. There’s nothing quite like walking into a dealership and having them get out a real price list.
Mike J
@Mnemosyne: Tell me about it.
The good thing about it is when everybody is one the same page it’s feels like elves are writing code in the middle of the night and when you wake up stuff that was broken yesterday works today.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike J: It’s not done by elves? I was misinformed.
Little Boots
sully’s saddest hour. worse than glass. just sad. just not good.
Mike in NC
@lamh36:
Well, I had no plans to buy a car last month, either. But I’d looked up the estimated value of my 2004 Honda CR-V with 206K miles on it at Kelly Blue Book ($4000) before getting it appraised by the dealer I got it serviced at. They offered me $3000 as a trade-in without seriously inspecting it (new tires but inoperable power locks). Two hours later we left with a new car that cost very little more than the sticker price of my old 10-year-old car. If I waited until the end of the year to trade it in, the 2014 models would all be long gone. Extremely painless transaction.
Omnes Omnibus
@Little Boots: Glass was largely Michael Kelly’s problem. He was hired while Sullivan was editor, but his story were made up during Kelly’s reign.
Little Boots
@Omnes Omnibus:
that is true. unfair to pin that on sully, who has enough to pin.
Omnes Omnibus
@Little Boots: Murray and McCaughley are bad enough.
Mnemosyne
@Mike in NC:
Inoperable power locks was probably just a $5 fuse that needed to be replaced. At least, that’s what it turned out to be on my Subaru Impreza, and as a warranty repair I didn’t pay anything.
Goblue72
@beltane: Agreed. I don’t really care what TNR was or was not 40, 50 years ago. 75 years ago, Republicans were the not racist party. Who gives a flying fart in either case? The present is what’s relevant.
Karen in GA
@lamh36: First time looking at motorcycles, one dealership pushed me to buy when I wasn’t ready. At another dealer, I told the salesperson, “Ignore me, I’m not ready to buy yet.” He proceeded to tell me all about the bike I was looking at. I thanked him but then reminded him I wasn’t ready to buy. He said (paraphrasing), “That’s okay, it’s quiet right now, and I like talking about this stuff anyway. And hopefully when you are ready, you’ll come back here.”
Between my first bike, my husband’s new bike, and my husband’s trade-in of that bike for a more powerful one, the guy made three sales just by not pressuring me the first time I went there.
Bobby Thomson
@Omnes Omnibus: Hope springs eternal, man.
Bobby Thomson
@Samuel Knight:
In fairness, Ezra had a fairly lengthy column the other day essentially saying, “where were all you fine men of principle when Marty was being super racist?” And to his credit, he accepted some blame for that, too.
RSA
@Mnemosyne:
I take it that Howard is commenting more on the short memory of the IT field as a whole than on the specific language. Re-inventing the wheel is rampant, and it usually happens without taking into account the theory developed for the original stuff.
Elizabelle
Tribute to Mike Nichols on TCM tonight.
8:00 p Eastern (like, now!): Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
followed by The Graduate and then Carnal Knowledge.
Kay
Okay, here’s a Christmas treat.
schrodinger's cat
@Redshift: I was being facetious, please to adjust your snark meter.
I have programming nightmares because I had to once modify a poorly commented legacy program in C for a research project which went on for elebenty pages. A process I did not enjoy at all.
Lurking Canadian
@Kay: No matter how awful Megs gets, she can always get worse. I can’t believe she wrote that. Not even McArdle should be that clueless and un-self-aware. How does she manage to brush her teeth without poking her eyes out?
Kay
@Lurking Canadian:
It’s just that if this were about anything else other than people she knows and her particular area of work she would be ripping in to them for refusing to yield to the inherent brilliance of market forces and really rich people. But it’s not. It’s her people, and her profession, so we get this explanation of how they’re different.
J
@Kay: This is exactly right.
Barbara
@Redshift: I dunno, the place where my husband-the-computer-engineer-works is pretty committed to cutting local staffing and sending work abroad, even with all the issues that come with farming work out overseas.
So far, they’ve tried a company in Pakistan, one in India, and are now contracting with a Ukrainian company. They refuse to give up on the idea. Logic, reason, bitter experience all mean nothing to dumb MBAs.
mainmati
@J: Yes, this is the best analysis of the degradation of the TNR on this blog. It was a steady degeneration of true intellectual and progressive thought and the hijacking of the magazine by right-wing and/or middle brow hacks in the ’80s to the present (but I stopped reading it after the early ’80s when the hijacking became obvious).
Anya
@Omnes Omnibus: One winter I was stuck at my grandparents chalet in Vermont and I had nothing but back issues of TNR. All I’ve read was justification of why black people are stupid and/or shiftless and lazy. I think the Sully and then Michael Kelly years were horrendously racist. And I bet you, all these VSP are not crying for the good days when TNR was bastion of liberal values, but they’re crying for the Sully and Kelly years. So, I can see where Freddy is coming from.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
lamh36: In a word – car rental agencies like Herz is the only way to buy used cars. No dickering, low book value and the cars are a year old and have been maintained.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Barbara:
That’s pretty backwards this day age. Google has been insourcing because they found out their off shore contractors were getting paid to do nothing because management couldn’t kept tract of them.
J
@mainmati: Thanks! I’ll save my tears for the moment–and I hope it never comes–when the New York Review of Books is bought by silicon valley billionaire intent on transforming it.
dm
@Howard Beale IV: “Just what we need-another reinvention of the 30-year old Logo language.”
Make that “47 year old Logo programming language”
…And the odds are pretty good that the site and language were designed by the direct lineal heirs of Feuerzeig (who named the Logo language, and who died recently), Papert, and Solomon (and, in fact, the early code puzzles on the site use Anna and Elsa as virtual Logo turtles to draw snowflakes).
Richard Shindledecker
Since Sully’s so courageous did he ever discuss whether gay guys are more stupid because they’re gay?
Ed
credit where credit is due – Freddie nails it.
Weeping for any publication that endorsed Lieberman is 100% wrong.